ABOVE: May Howard fifth-grader Erasto Baltazar tests the paper airplane he made with Gulfstream engineers Friday during Engineers Week. BELOW: Fourth-graders at May Howard Elementary made working bottle rockets with the help of local engineers during the school’s Engineers Week.

Mitsubishi Power Engineer Casey Swain showed May Howard fourth-graders how to improve their problematic mousetrap racing cars Friday, and Cami Lowry was glad to get professional help.

Her mousetrap car, made with compact disc wheels, rolled an impressive 18.8 feet but was blown away by a car designed by students in a different class.

“We put rubber bands on the wheels to cause a little friction and we wrapped our spring pretty tight to make more tension, but we didn’t win,” she said.

Classmate Alex Dolan pointed out that after they sprang their mousetrap to set their cars in motion, the long metal bar that held back the mousetrap hammer was dragged along the ground.

“It caused too much friction and slowed our cars down,” she said.

Jackson Barger shook his head disapprovingly.

“Ours weren’t very well engineered,” he said.

But after a week of hands-on instruction from local engineering professionals, his twin brother, Harrison Barger, took offense.

“Maybe yours wasn’t, but mine was,” he said.

May Howard Elementary’s Engineers Week events introduced students to engineering and got them thinking about the ways engineering impacts their lives every day. The event is part of a national celebration designed to engage students in engineering.

Students in kindergarten through fifth grade spent the week learning how engineers solve problems to make things work. They made slime with chemical engineers and paper airplanes with aerospace engineers.

They built bridges, Rube Goldberg Machines, mousetrap cars and bottle rockets. They explored the inner workings of everything from toilets to robots.

“They’re having so much fun they don’t even realize they’re learning,” May Howard parent Cindy Swain said Friday.

Ashraf Saad, head of the Armstrong Atlantic State University Computer Science Department, showed students how to program robot cars to navigate a paper grid he laid out on the hallway floor.

“I’m just piquing their interest in robotics programming,” Saad said. “I want to raise their curiosity about the way programming works and how you get things to do what you want them to do.”

Gulfstream engineers Huy Nguyen, Michael Wolf and Ted Meyer gave each fifth-grade student a piece of resume paper and a paper clip and showed them how to fold wings, spoilers and flaps to make paper planes that could fly fast, far or loop-the-loop.

Erasto Baltazar’s plane made a sharp nose dive into the linoleum, but after a few quick adjustments, he had a much sleeker, faster design.

Among the lessons students learned was that it takes a lot of scientific working and reworking to engineer solutions.

Erasto was pleased with his redesigned paper plane.

“I just gave it a really sharp point at the nose, and it went a lot farther,” he said. “I like my second plane better.”